Vanishing

This body of work represents several years of documenting the iconic yet vanishing rural landscapes of North America. The images are both mundane and symbolic. They are scenes etched into our souls. But they are quickly vanishing from the national landscape. Wooden grain elevators and silos are being replaced by industrial storage facilities; deteriorating barns will never be rebuilt. One-room schoolhouses and country churches, once the anchor of their communities, are left abandoned. Rural homes are often pre-fab structures today; and watermen's shacks and fishing docks are disappearing altogether.

The photos are all long exposures with the lens kept open for extended periods of 1-4 minutes or longer. This has the effect of capturing the movement of the clouds, rendering them soft and blurred or radiating in various directions, depending on the wind and the movement as well as the cloud structure at the time the image was taken.

These moving clouds symbolize time moving forward in the face of the ephemeral lifespan of these vanishing strutures and the rich history they represent.